Television in the Age of Radio is a unique account of how television came to be, not just from technical innovations or institutional struggles, but from cultural concerns that were central to the rise of industrial modernity. A major revision of the history of television, it provides investigations of the values of early television amateurs and enthusiasts, the passions and worries about competing technologies, and the ambitions for programming that together helped mold the medium.

Television in the Age of Radio is a unique account of how television came to be, not just from technical innovations or institutional struggles, but from cultural concerns that were central to the rise of industrial modernity. A major revision of the history of television, it provides investigations of the values of early television amateurs and enthusiasts, the passions and worries about competing technologies, and the ambitions for programming that together helped mold the medium.

Wired TV looks at the post–network television industry’s experiments with new forms of interactive storytelling that took place from 2005 to2010 as broadband was introduced into the majority of homes and the use of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter soared. Essays address such issues as the networks’ sporadic efforts to engage fans using transmedia storytelling, production inefficiencies, and the effect of corporate conglomeration on entrepreneurial creativity. The television franchises discussed include Lost, The Office, Entourage, and Battlestar Gallactica.

Thoroughly grounded in extensive archival research, Tainted Earth traces the rise of public health concerns about nonferrous smelting in the western United States, focusing on three major facilities: Tacoma, Washington; El Paso, Texas; and Bunker Hill, Idaho. It documents the response from community residents, public health scientists, the industry, and the government to pollution from smelters and the long road to protecting public health and the environment.

Thoroughly grounded in extensive archival research, Tainted Earth traces the rise of public health concerns about nonferrous smelting in the western United States, focusing on three major facilities: Tacoma, Washington; El Paso, Texas; and Bunker Hill, Idaho. It documents the response from community residents, public health scientists, the industry, and the government to pollution from smelters and the long road to protecting public health and the environment.

By examining the meaning of shtetl, Jeffrey Shandler asks how Jewish life in provincial towns in Eastern Europe has become the subject of extensive creativity, memory, and scholarship. He traces the trajectory of writing about these towns, by Jews and non-Jews, residents and visitors, researchers, novelists, memoirists, journalists, and others, to demonstrate how the Yiddish word for “town” emerged as a key word in Jewish culture and Jewish studies. 

Rebecca Prime documents the untold story of the American directors, screenwriters, and actors who exiled themselves to Europe as a result of the Hollywood blacklist. During the 1950s and 1960s, these Hollywood émigrés directed, wrote, or starred in almost one hundred European productions. The book offers a compelling argument for the significance of these blacklisted expats to our understanding of postwar American and European cinema and Cold War relations.

This ground-breaking book draws upon a rich set of ethnographic and survey data, collected over a six-year period, to explore the roles that Catholicism and family play in shaping Filipino American community life. It illustrates the powerful ways these forces structure and animate not only how first-generation Filipino Americans think and feel about their community, but how they are compelled to engage it over issues deemed important to the sanctity of the family.

This ground-breaking book draws upon a rich set of ethnographic and survey data, collected over a six-year period, to explore the roles that Catholicism and family play in shaping Filipino American community life. It illustrates the powerful ways these forces structure and animate not only how first-generation Filipino Americans think and feel about their community, but how they are compelled to engage it over issues deemed important to the sanctity of the family.

Diane E. King has written about everyday life in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which covers much of the area long known as Iraqi Kurdistan. One of the few scholars who has done research during the Saddam Hussein regime, King offers a sensitive interpretation of the contradiction resulting from the intersection of tradition with modernity, exploring the ways that residents connect socially through patron-client relationships and as people belonging to gendered categories.

Diane E. King has written about everyday life in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which covers much of the area long known as Iraqi Kurdistan. One of the few scholars who has done research during the Saddam Hussein regime, King offers a sensitive interpretation of the contradiction resulting from the intersection of tradition with modernity, exploring the ways that residents connect socially through patron-client relationships and as people belonging to gendered categories.

Health care is more expensive in the United States than in other wealthy nations, and access varies significantly across space and social classes. In this case study, James A. Schafer Jr. uses the city of Philadelphia in the early twentieth-century to show that these problems reflect the informal organization of health care in a free market system in which profit and demand, rather than social welfare and public health needs, direct the distribution and cost of crucial resources.

Electronic Iran introduces the concept of the Iranian Internet, a framework that captures interlinked, transnational networks of virtual and offline spaces. It draws from early Internet ethnographies, accounts in media studies that highlight the continuities between old and new media, and a range of works that have made critical interventions in the field of Iranian studies to confront conventional wisdom about digital media in general, and contemporary Iranian culture and politics in particular.

This book provides a complex, insightful portrait of intermarried couples and the new forms of American Judaism that they are constructing. It tells the stories of intermarried couples, the rabbis and other Jewish educators who work with them, and the conflicting public conversations about intermarriage among American Jews. Ethnography is used to describe the compelling concerns of all of these parties and places their anxieties firmly within the context of American religious culture and morality.

Borderlands Saints examines the rise and fall of popular saints and saint-like figures in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Focusing specifically on Teresa Urrea (La Santa de Cabora), Pancho Villa, César Chávez, Subcomandante Marcos, and Santa Muerte, the book traces the intersections of these figures, their devotees, artistic representations, and dominant institutions with an eye for the ways in which such unofficial saints mirror traditional spiritual practices and serve specific cultural needs.

Why are some cases of genocide prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? In this collection, contributors approach the question from a variety of perspectives and case studies, including the suppression of discussion about indigenous populations in the Americas and Australia, the reasons why the genocide of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks long remained out of sight, and the violence that was the precursor to and the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Why are some cases of genocide prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? In this collection, contributors approach the question from a variety of perspectives and case studies, including the suppression of discussion about indigenous populations in the Americas and Australia, the reasons why the genocide of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks long remained out of sight, and the violence that was the precursor to and the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Look Closer examines contemporary media texts that use American suburbia not just as a setting, but as a central component of narrative and thematic development. It discusses the myth of suburban perfection popularized by postwar sitcoms and advertisements and explores how the directors and producers behind today’s films and television series use the spaces of suburbia to tell stories about America as well as critique the conservative ideologies that underpin the suburban American Dream.

This book argues that sentimentalism, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary mode, is alive and well in the modern era. By examining working-class literature that adopts the rhetoric of “feeling right” in order to promote a proletarian or humanist ideology as well as neo-slave narratives that wrestle with the legacy of slavery and cultural definitions of African American families, it explores the ways contemporary authors engage with familiar sentimental clichés and ideals.

Tough on Hate is the first book to examine the cultural politics of hate crimes both within and beyond the law. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including personal interviews, unarchived documents, television news broadcasts, legislative debates, and presidential speeches, the book challenges readers to reconsider their understanding of hate crimes and raises startling questions about the trajectory of civil and minority rights.

Tough on Hate is the first book to examine the cultural politics of hate crimes both within and beyond the law. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including personal interviews, unarchived documents, television news broadcasts, legislative debates, and presidential speeches, the book challenges readers to reconsider their understanding of hate crimes and raises startling questions about the trajectory of civil and minority rights.

In-depth interviews with participants in non-traditional families are used to argue that same-sex marriage cannot be understood as simply entrenching or contesting heterosexual privilege. Instead, Katrina Kimport contends that these new legally sanctioned relationships can both reinforce as well as disrupt the association of marriage and heterosexuality. She provides a nuanced, accessible, and theoretically grounded framework for understanding the powerful effect of heterosexual expectations on both sexual and social categories.

The work and family lives of Mexican American women in a community near the U.S.-Mexico border in California’s Imperial County are examined. Wells provides stories of the struggles, triumphs, and everyday experiences of these women and explores the social structures that create the barriers, constraints, and opportunities that have shaped their lives. These women aspire to achieve the American Dream, but the realities of life in a rural, agricultural border community strictly limit social mobility for these descendants of immigrant farm laborers.

This timely book scrutinizes accounts of acts as diverse as genocide, environmental degradation, war, torture, terrorism, homicide, rape, and meat-eating in order to develop an original theoretical framework with which to consider harmful actions and their causes. Chapter by chapter, it examines statements made by perpetrators of a wide variety of harmful actions, identifying the logics they share that motivate, legitimize, and sustain them and mapping out strategies for reducing harm.

Black Resonance analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin. The book focuses on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s; each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice.

Classrooms and Clinics is the first book-length assessment of the development of public school health policies from the late nineteenth century through the early years of the Great Depression. Richard A. Meckel examines the efforts of early twentieth-century child health care advocates and reformers to utilize urban schools to deliver health care services to socioeconomically disadvantaged and medically underserved children in the primary grades to improve children’s health and thereby improve their academic performance.

This collection presents eleven original essays by historians whose own ethnic backgrounds shaped the choices they have made about their research and writing as scholars. These authors, historians of American immigration and ethnicity, revisited family and personal experiences and reflect on how their lives helped shape their later scholarly pursuits. They address issues of diversity, multiculturalism, and assimilation in academia, in the discipline of history, and in society at large.

This collection presents eleven original essays by historians whose own ethnic backgrounds shaped the choices they have made about their research and writing as scholars. These authors, historians of American immigration and ethnicity, revisited family and personal experiences and reflect on how their lives helped shape their later scholarly pursuits. They address issues of diversity, multiculturalism, and assimilation in academia, in the discipline of history, and in society at large.

When Sex Changed analyzes the ways literary texts responded to the political, economic, sexual, and social values put forward by the birth control movements of the 1910s to the 1930s in the United States and Great Britain. The book compares disparate responses to the birth control controversy, from early skepticism by mainstream feminists, to concerns about the movement’s race and class implications, to enthusiastic speculation about contraception’s political implications.

Amigas y Amantes (Friends and Lovers) explores the experiences of sexually nonconforming Latinas in the creation and maintenance of families. It is based on forty-two in-depth enthnographic interviews with women who identify as lesbian, bisexual, or queer (LBQ) and draws from fourteen months of participant observation at LBQ Latina events that Katie L. Acosta conducted in 2007 and 2008 in a major northeast city. The book examines how LBQ Latinas manage loving relationships with the families who raised them, and with their partners, their children, and their friends.

American Dictators is the dual biography of two legendary New Jersey political bosses: Frank Hague, who intimidated presidents and wielded unchallenged power for over three decades, and Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, the inspiration for the hit HBO series, Boardwalk Empire. Packed with compelling information and written in an informal, sometimes humorous style, the book shows Hague and Johnson at the peak of their power and the strength of their political machines during the years of Prohibition and the Great Depression.

The Glass Slipper is about the persistence of a familiar Anglo-American love story into the digital age. Susan Ostrov Weisser compares diverse narratives, historical and contemporary from high literature and “low” genres, discussing novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, Victorian women’s magazines, and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover; romantic movies; popular Harlequin romance novels; masochistic love in films; pornography and its relationship to romance; and reality TV and Internet ads as romantic stories.

Traditionally, the history of the birth control movement has been told through the accounts of the leaders, organizations, and legislation that shaped the campaign. Historians have recently begun examining the cultural work of printed media, including newspapers, magazines, and novels in fostering support for the cause. This book builds upon this new scholarship on the women’s reproductive health movement to explore the films and radio and television broadcasts developed by twentieth-century birth control advocates to promote family planning in the U.S. and internationally.

This visual representation of New Mexico and its people is a fascinating study of how the region has been depicted in film from the dawn of early filmmaking and the silent era to today. Meléndez examines such films as Adventures in Kit Carson Land, The Rattlesnake, and Red Sky at Morning, among others, that have both educated and misinformed us about a state in our own midst that remains a “distant locale” to most white Americans.

The essays in this unique book argue for the inclusion of race as a social construction in the design of large-scale data collection efforts and how scientists must utilize race in the context of specific research questions. This landmark collection concludes on a prescriptive note, providing an arsenal of multidisciplinary, conceptual, and methodological tools for studying race specifically within the context of health inequalities.